Seekers of Tomorrow (40 page)

Back in Hollywood again, Leiber found the going rough, with fantastic his one steady magazine market, supplemented by Ballantine Books, which helped to keep his name alive with a reissue of
Night's Black
Agents
in paperback (sans
Adept's Gambit)
and following this with a horror collection,
Shadows With
Eyes
(1962).

During 1960 and 1961, to keep food on the table Leiber did four three-month continuities for the Buck Rogers daily strip and Sunday page for the National Newspaper Syndi-cate. He found the effort of turning out sheer plot and dialogue no more profitable than writing pulp fiction.

When American International purchased
Conjure Wife
for a motion picture with a script written by accomplished fantasy craftsmen Richard Matheson and Charles Beaumont (this was the picture released as
Burn Witch Burn),
Leiber got a boost to his ego but no inflation of the pocketbook. He no longer controlled rights to the work.

Despite his precarious economic status, he decided to gam-ble the better part of a year on
The
Wanderer,
a 120,000-word novel of a lacquered planet which abruptly appears in space alongside the moon, causing earthquakes and tidal disasters on Earth. This was intended to be the definitive world-doom story, told in alternating vignettes of various stratas of society.

Sticking close to grim "realism" has paid off richly in science fiction for Robert A. Heinlein, Arthur C. Clarke, John Wyndham, John Christopher, and various others, and it might have for Leiber, too, but he wouldn't follow the rules. In-stead of settling for a single departure from the norm and then throwing the spotlight on human reaction, Leiber has connected the actions of his characters with bizarre extrater-restrial happenings.

The story builds with increasing fascination into a highly advanced epic, conceptually in the vanguard of modern science fiction and to that degree gratifying to the seasoned reader sated with predigested pabulum marketable to the masses by virtue of a self-imposed limit on imagination. The world-doom story, with the focus entirely on the fate and reactions of the "man in the street," has been told with high skill and extraordinary effectiveness for over 150 years. It is debatable if today's practitioners have added much that was not in
The Last Man
by Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley in 1826 or in
Deluge
by S. Fowler Wright over a century later (1929). Yet, it is quite possible that in
The Wanderer,
Fritz Leiber has shown that there are ways of writing science fiction so that it can hold both the basic and the advanced audience. In attempting to show the effect of the catastrophe on a dozen or more people concurrently, Leiber's effect becomes unartfully choppy. Nevertheless, though the reader moves bumpily along, he remains interested, never losing track of the disparate variety of characters and situations. As the invading planet is discovered to be a propelled world, inhabited by multitudinous diverse creatures working in har-mony; with their revelation of the state of galactic civiliza-tion and travel through hyperspace, the story moves into superscience, but this is balanced and even made more accept-able by contrast with more ordinary events on Earth and the reactions of the Earthmen.

Interest grows as the inhabitants of the invading world attempt to rectify some of the harm they have done, prior to answering to a "police" world which is pursuing them, intent on preventing inadvertent damage to less advanced civiliza-tions. Their makeshift efforts to right some of the wrongs they have done are rejected as insufficient by the pursuing globe and a clash of the two worlds moves them out of our space-time continuum.

The Wanderer
is flawed but far from a failure. Had it first been published in hard covers and widely reviewed, it might have made a larger first impression. Amid a flood of paper-backs it was almost lost, but already laudatory bits and pieces are cropping up in science-fiction criticism. It may enjoy a delayed reaction, which could prove decisive in Leiber's career.

While Fritz Leiber has made his mark, his story is in every sense an unfinished one. The Grey Mouser series has estab-lished him as the greatest living writer in the sword and sorcery tradition. A pioneer in the attempt to modernize the ancient symbols of terror, he has also gained recognition for spearheading a movement to the lore of fantasy and witch-craft in the body of science fiction. As a stylist he ranks among the finest writers of fantasy today, one possessing rare gifts of characterization and humor. Even as an entertainer he has something to say, taking definite stands on social questions. Throughout his writing career the "branches of time" theme has fascinated him. In three of his biggest novels,
Destiny Times Three, The Big Time,
and
The Wanderer,
as well as in many shorter works, he has speculated on what might happen if the reel of life could be rewound and played out again.
Destiny Times
Three
is much more than the title of one of Leiber's finest stories; it is a symbol of the three separate starts he has made in his writing career, in search of he knows not what.

E. Hoffman Price, pulp magazine writer of the 1930's, never tires of telling anecdotes about the remarkable Farns-worth Wright, editor of weird tales, who either discovered or helped develop a third of today's great names in fantasy fiction. Wright would invariably "dig into his desk, and thrust a manuscript at me," Price recalls. "The accompanying sales talk would have made the hypothetical Man from Mars mistake me for the prospective purchaser, and Farnsworth for the author's agent!

"But the highest peak was reached," Price says, "in 1933, when he handed me a manuscript by one C. L. Moore.

"And that did take my breath. 'For Christ's sake, Plato (a nickname for Price), who is C. L. Moore? He, she, or it is colossal!' This, of all times, was when my enthusiasm equaled Farnsworth's. He quit work and we declared a C. L. Moore Day."

Shambleau,
the story responsible for the editorial holiday, appeared in the November, 1933, issue of weird tales. Wright led off the issue with the story and the impact on the readership was every bit as great as he anticipated. One of the most enthusiastic reactions came from the pen of the man Wright characterized as "the dean of weird fiction writ-ers," H. P. Lovecraft, who wrote:
"Shambleau
is great stuff. It begins
magnificently,
on just the right note of terror, and with black intimations of the unknown. The subtle evil of the Entity, as suggested by the unexplained horror of the people, is extremely powerful—and the description of the Thing itself when unmasked is no letdown. It has real atmosphere and tension—rare things amidst the pulp traditions of brisk, cheerful, staccato prose and lifeless stock characters and images. The one major fault is the conventional interplane-tary setting."
Shambleau
was a triumph of imagination, but beyond that it was a "first" story of such storytelling skill as to place its author among the pulp fantasy leaders of the era, which included H. P. Lovecraft, Robert E. Howard, Clark Ashton Smith, and A. Merritt. It introduced Northwest Smith, a scarred space outlaw, as fast with the ray blaster as his prototypes in the old West had been with the six shooter. A man nearing 40, with steely no-color eyes, a streak of murder in his makeup, and a psychological hardness that has resisted the most soul-destroying horrors. Northwest Smith rescues a strange brown girl from a Martian mob and takes her to his lodgings. When she unloosens her turban, instead of hair a cascade of worm-like tendrils falls like a cloak almost to her feet. Despite his revulsion, he is seduced by her allure and, buried in her Medusan coils of loathsome horror, experiences a sensuality that threatens his life force. The intervention of his Venusian friend Yarol saves him from ecstatic oblivion.

The storyteller's sense of pace, the characterization, the richness of language and imagery, and the provocative sexual undertones, all superbly handled, indicated a talent of a very high order. Lovecraft was wrong when he said the interplan-etary setting intruded. On the contrary, in
Shambleau,
as well as in the many Northwest Smith stories that followed, the setting on Mars and Venus made the extraordinary happen-ings far more believable than if they had occurred on Earth. Lovecraft himself, in his later years, leaned increasingly heavily upon the science-fiction format to give his horror themes reality. Moore was at the forefront of a hybrid literature known as "science-fantasy," popularized in weird tales by Lovecraft, Clark Ashton Smith, Nictzin Dyhalis, and Frank Belknap Long, which made a slightly larger concession to science than to the supernatural in the presentation of what was otherwise unbridled fantasy. It required a rich, colorful style, which C. L. Moore possessed in common with the other masters of this genre of fantasy literature.

The fact that C. L. Moore was a woman was carefully kept from the readers of weird tales. Farnsworth Wright may or may not have been aware of it, since the story was submitted without comment. Her sex was revealed by fan columnists Julius Schwartz and Mort Weisinger, writing in the May, 1934, issue of the fantasy fan. Since the fantasy fan never topped sixty in circulation, the news was slow in being passed along the grapevine. But editors frequently used the term "the author" when they referred to C. L. Moore, which seems to indicate that they were aware of her sex but avoided revealing it. While there had been many brilliant women writers of the supernatural previously—Mary E. Wilkins Freeman, May Sinclair, Gertrude Atherton, Elizabeth Bowen, and Edith Wharton among them—C. L. Moore was to become the most important member of her sex to contribute to science fiction since Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley wrote
Frankenstein.

Born January 24, 1911, in Indianapolis, Catherine Lucille Moore claims to have been in training for a writing career ever since she could communicate. "As soon as I could talk," she recalls, "I began telling long, obscure tales to everyone I could corner. When I learned to write I wrote them, and have been at it ever since....

"I was reared on a diet of Greek mythology, Oz books and Edgar Rice Burroughs, so you see I never had a chance.

"Nothing used to daunt my infant ambition. I wrote about cowboys and kings, Robin Hoods and Lancelots and Tarzans thinly disguised under other names. This went on for years and years, until one rainy afternoon in 1931 when I suc-cumbed to a lifelong temptation and bought a magazine called amazing stories whose cover portrayed six-armed men in a battle to the death
(Awlo of Ulm
by Capt. S. P. Meek, in the September, 1931, issue). From that moment on I was a convert. A whole new field of literature opened out before my admiring gaze, and the urge to imitate it was irresistible." Both her parents traced their families in this country back before the American Revolution and were of Scotch-Irish-Welsh extraction, with a flavoring of French added to the mixture in more recent generations. A Scottish-Gaelic back-ground is given to James Douglas, hero of C. L. Moore's
There Shall Be
Darkness
(astounding science-fiction, Feb-ruary, 1942), as well as a penchant for Scottish ballads, played on a Martian harp, to Venusian melodies.

On her mother's side, her grandfather was a Methodist minister and on her father's side a medical practitioner. Her father was a designer and manufacturer of machine tools, a vocation still followed in Indianapolis by her only brother, who in his trade has kept pace with the complexity of technological demands that seem to be science fiction come to life.

Illness plagued what would otherwise have been a very happy childhood, interrupting her schooling so drastically on several occasions that private tutoring was necessary. Poor health continued through her teen years, curtailing her social life and forcing her to turn to books for pleasure and to create her private dream worlds on paper.

A dramatically attractive brunette of average height, Catherine, with improved health, was entered at Indiana Uni-versity and found herself popular with the men. Formal dances were her favorite type of date and a chow mein dinner the epitome of culinary delight. Boys of that period must have found her, as Forrest J. Ackerman, a frequent correspondent and one-time collaborator, expressed it: "Catherine the Great, toast of weird tales, is two persons! One, an austere, introspective, enigmatic woman; the other, a charming, disarming, gay young girl."

The worsening economics of the depression forced her out of college after only a year and a half, and in 1930, she went to work as a secretary in an Indianapolis bank. After closing hours, she would sit on a balcony overlooking the main floor, undisturbed in the quiet solemnity of the institution, and write fiction. Her first professional try was aimed at amazing stories, according to a report in
Weird Whisperings
(a news column by Mort Weisinger and Julius Schwartz) in the Sep-tember, 1934, issue of the fantasy fan, and was rejected by editor T. O'Conor Sloane. They reported that she agreed the piece deserved to be turned down and went into her archives and was never seen again.

Northwest Smith, the famous character of
Shambleau,
first took form in her mind as a western gunman in a ranch called the Bar-Nothing. She reports that an epic poem about North-west Smith as a space ranger was written even before the first story and it opened with the lines:

Northwest Smith was a hard-boiled guy

With an iron fist and a roving eye-----That, too, seems to have been filed in limbo, though there is a possibility that snatches of poetry that have appeared in Northwest Smith stories might be excerpts from that ballad. The passing years have blurred Moore's recollections of the history of the first Northwest Smith story,
Shambleau.
However, there was an early report so precise in Mortimer Weisinger's
The Ether Vibrates
column (fantasy magazine, September, 1934) that it must be seriously considered. It read: "C. L. Moore first submitted her 'Northwest' Smith stories to wonder stories on June 8, 1933. They were rejected six days later—only because of their weird theme."